Twitter, Vlogs and Vidlogue entering mainstream

A couple of numbers and a publisher heavyweight now support our long-held opinion at Holler that twittering and video responses and dialogues are entering the mainstream. Twitter is the fastest growing social media site with 343% YOY growth thanks to big press coverage and election tie ins. In contrast to out-of-favour SecondLife the hype is less founded on a snazzy interface but a myriad of extensions, connections to other platforms and real and lasting changes to user behaviour/patterns.

Wearing my Twitter shirt / by nialkennedy

Apparently it is enough of a pull to lure Britney Spears into using it and lest we forget, MC Hammer has threatened that it’s Twittertime!. The current WIRED has a funny opinion piece by Valleywagger Paul Boutin (commented here by The Guardian) suggesting to “kill your blog” and to use twitter instead: more personal, more succinct with nice brevity and mobile/ubiquituous character. He even condensed his whole article into

On the video front, my term of “vidlogue” is probably as silly as the next phrase, trying to encompass time-delayed video chats and video responses. But if the term catches on, I am claiming full and complete genius for coining it. If it has been coined by someone else before, I am claiming full DUH!-ness for not knowing.

It would be interesting to see if participation in these four places outnumbers the manual video uploads from users’ hard drives (which I predict it will). Submissions to the services or the BBC directly are potentially going on air (regular TV that is). The equivalent for us in digital adland would be to take YouTube submissions from a branded channel going onto Australian TV. Imagine the above-the-line ad guys developing an ulcer over this: no pre-tested storylines, no uber-important director and talent casting and worst of all, no exotic location for the shoot (Shazza’s bedroom anyone?)

Next time we get challenged on why these tools make sense in a campaign we’ll share some numbers (please add more stat links if you have). It is definitely not Geek anymore…

3 responses to “Twitter, Vlogs and Vidlogue entering mainstream”

Hi, this is Sol from 12seconds. Cool post. Today we did a pretty informal thing with BBC and got about 40 responses. Last week we did something with Current and got well over 100. Just some data which supports your theory!

Good post indeed. As far as the WIRED article: WIRED tends to do that sometimes. You know, come out with statements like that. I doubt blogs are over, however they made their point clear.

If you look at how behavior has shifted from concern over privacy a couple of years ago, to sudden adoption of social networks where I essentially become voluntarily transparent and now add growth of location-based SNs such brightkite to it, it’s obvious that opinion making and value exchange is bound to become even more context-driven and less stationary, as blogs are.